You don't even need an actual website. I just type 1.2.3.4 and it always redirects fine for me.
NeverSSL
51–60 of 212 posts
Re: NeverSSL
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I regularly used that as a known-good site that should be up with no SSL, I'd trust that an apple-maintained site (backed by akamai) would be up before "example.com". I'm sure there are plenty of others, but someone might remember that URL over another so I thought it would be helpful.
example.com is maintained by IANA. It's an official example address for documentation purposes. So on one hand, it will survive even if Apple disappears, on the other, they're likely not expecting any significant traffic.
Using the site for captive portal access does not actually generate any traffic for the site, because the middlebox intercepts and rewrites the request. Traffic only occurs if there is no captive portal. Hence the easily parsed "Success" body of the Apple site.
Re: NeverSSL
#53For the French speakers among us, http://perdu.com/ has been around since the 90s.
Re: NeverSSL
#54I don't get it. What does it do stop redirecting users to the https version?
Re: NeverSSL
#55It's sad, because these are the kinds of things that confuse the hell out of "common folk" and explaining requires explaining HTTPS, HSTS, how captive WiFi portals work, and then ultimately, why there isn't a better solution... which maybe doesn't have a great answer. I feel like this "workaround" site is designed to draw attention to the problem at hand more than it is meant to be useful for the task at hand?
This isn't generally a problem on smartphones and tablets because they can usually detect captive portals and prompt the user appropriately.
Windows does the same thing, at least in 10. I get a notification that further action is required and clicking it opens a no-SSL Microsoft URL that Will redirect.
Re: NeverSSL
#56It's sad, because these are the kinds of things that confuse the hell out of "common folk" and explaining requires explaining HTTPS, HSTS, how captive WiFi portals work, and then ultimately, why there isn't a better solution... which maybe doesn't have a great answer. I feel like this "workaround" site is designed to draw attention to the problem at hand more than it is meant to be useful for the task at hand?
This isn't generally a problem on smartphones and tablets because they can usually detect captive portals and prompt the user appropriately.
[deleted]
Re: NeverSSL
#57It's sad, because these are the kinds of things that confuse the hell out of "common folk" and explaining requires explaining HTTPS, HSTS, how captive WiFi portals work, and then ultimately, why there isn't a better solution... which maybe doesn't have a great answer. I feel like this "workaround" site is designed to draw attention to the problem at hand more than it is meant to be useful for the task at hand?
The question that I always ask family is, "Can you get to www.purple.com if you're having trouble?" It does what it says, is easy to understand, and is obvious if it's not functional.
Re: NeverSSL
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I used to hit Reddit, but they went to SSL by default. Since then, I've had to route people to xkcd who didn't know how to get around this issue.
So that's three of us. Funny how so many of us come to the same conclusion of using xkcd.
Weird. Me too. I think it's because it's a frequently-visited site, so it shows up next to the Facebook button in the Chrome default page.
Re: NeverSSL
#59I really wish there was a standard way of handling captive wifi portals, macOS and GNOME try to detect these portals and show them but sometimes it is unreliable. It'd be really nice if there was a reserved DNS entry (like captive.portal or something) that operating systems could try to resolve and if it points to anything other than an expected value (loopback address, maybe?) it will bring up a window to sign into…
It's so annoying that I even wrote a script so I could connect to Starbucks WiFi without having to use a browser. This was back when I was on Linux using a tiling window manager but I still use it on macOS because it's useful.
Re: NeverSSL
#60I was really hoping for a (possibly unhinged) manifesto against ssl, but this is good too.